The Lovelorn Cuttle

This week an odd little familiar that turned up while I was looking at some Venetian material.

I’ve been reading “Venice is a fish” and there’s a section in it which, to me, seems to be a perfect origin story for a. familiar

Here’s the quote:

“Apart from the inevitable mess left by man’s best friend it is only in Zetterra ins springtime that you need to watch where you put your feet. Some Venetians go there to fish at night using lamps and torches to attract enamoured cuttlefish and catch them in a sort of big butterfly net From the bottom of their buckets the captured cuttlefish catch you unawares by spurting ink into the stones of the shore, staining socks and trousers.”

My idea is a poetic Jerbiton magus is walking along the Lido and sees a cuttlefish. It has been destroyed by love and responds by sending out huge amounts of ink. He thinks “I’ve been there comrade!” and saves it from someone’s dinner.

He eventually binds it as a familiar this leads to some questions as to the practicalities. With a bond quality you could make a cuttlefish able to breathe air. Alternatively you could have a series of halfpipes through the areas where the magus lives filled with fresh water magically, allowing his familiar to follow him around and make itself useful in the laboratory. I’d prefer one that can fly just because I like the idea of him jetting about.

Cuttlefish can taste through their suckers which means in an avian cuttle you’d have a sense of smell. Cuttles are likely interesting to illusionists because they don’t see the way that humans do. They can’t see colour which isn’t all that odd for a familiar but they don’t focus their eyes by reshaping their lenses. In a cuttle the lens actually moves forward and back like the slide on a telescope to create a point on one of two Focus areas on the back of the eye. Cuttles don’t have blind spots because their optic nerve doesn’t come through the surface of the retina and then splay out nerve fibers on the inner surface of the eye. In what is clearly a better design the optic nerve comes to the back of the eye and the optic nerves come through the back of the retina directly to the sensors.

I’m not sure if I want him to be able to speak. I quite like the idea that he communicates with people not his master by flashing written words on his skin using chromatophores. In real life cuttles communicate with each other by chromatophore, but also by changing their texture, posture, and movement. This cuttle might not be limited to letters. It might be able to draw diagrams and hieroglyphs on itself. They produce sepia which can be used as a writing ink and can be altered in the lab to produce a surprisingly wide range of colours.

Their blood is based on hemocyanin which means that it’s bluish-green and it needs to be pumped about faster than red blood. It carries less oxygen. To allow this the cuttle has three hearts one by each gill and one is a general system pump. Magi tend to develop the physical characteristics of their familiars, so does this mean that the Jerbiton magus develops extra hearts?

Some cuttles, in real life, seem to sleep.. That is they enter a dormant state from which they can rapidly emerge. During this they have rapid eye movement, twitching tentacles and chromatophore changes. In short: they seem to dream. I think I’ll call him Ardent. In Latin his name would be ardens and that means he who burns which is a good name for a Flambeau magus.